January 21, 2009—Wealth and asset management firm Robert W. Baird & Co. has published the January edition of RFID Monthly. The company is now publishing its updates on a rolling basis to the new website, rfid-monthly.com. Check there for the full update. Following are highlights:

IT data standard creates opportunity. In December, the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) provided the requirements for its RFID Data Center Asset Tracking Standard, which we view as having significant importance for the potential adoption of RFID in enterprise data centers in a wide number of vertical and horizontal markets, including government, retail, web hosting and search engines, in addition to financial services. We see the potential RFID opportunity exceeding $750M, which is detailed in the "Industry Information" section.

In 2009, we expect the year will begin slowly, but we still see growth. As we indicated in the December edition, we are clearly seeing evidence of economic-related project push backs, and our most recent survey of bar code resellers suggests that the current appetite for project spending is low. However, we expect increased activity in 2H09, even if the economy remains sluggish. We base this view on the industry progress made in the last year, particularly with respect to the positive ROI pilot activity that has been occurring in the past six months. We hear from several industry contacts that they continue to work on larger projects in both the U.S. and Europe that are ready to go once funding becomes available.

We see several key trends to look for in 2009. These include advancements in IT data centers, electronic vehicle registration and healthcare. Apparel, which has a large number of pilots, likely moves more slowly until 2H09 given the weak state of that end market. We see consolidation activity increasing and expect a substantially higher development of solutions based on key business problems.

Retail shrink will likely help drive opportunity. As we discussed in the past, key retail use cases for RFID seem to be focused on out-of-stocks, inventory management, item location and loss prevention/security. Most of the early use case development centers on out-of-stocks and inventory management as they have a direct impact on revenue as well as operations. However, as we have evaluated certain sets of data, we have come to the conclusion that loss prevention/security represents a sizable problem and a good incremental RFID use case in the retail space.